Archive for September, 2009

I’m busy on a post that’s proving to be a real beast and it’s far from finished as of this writing. My brother is coming to visit next week which means I’ll probably be otherwise engaged and unable to put anything up for the first anniversary of the blog.

Anyway, to try and maintain at least a minimum of four posts per month, I’m going to share this trailer for a charming wee Korean comedy that I highly recommend. Yongo Wanjeon Jeongbok (Please Teach Me English).

Granted, this film probably resonates more deeply with someone who works as an English teacher in Korea but I still stand by it as a well made and genuinely amusing little flick.

Trouble Brewing In The World Of K-Pop. Beloved Boy Band Bopper Bashes Korea. “Korea Is Gay!” Says Degenerate Westernized Ingrate.

Highly dubious specimen of masculinity, Park Jae-beom

Outrage has been rife throughout the Korean republic in recent days after it emerged that a prominent member of one of the nation’s most promising and popular music groups had harshly criticized the country in which he has found considerable success. Park Jae-beom (AKA Jay Park) of award winning boy band 2PM issued the treasonous slurs on a popular social networking site in 2005 whilst sending messages to an acquaintance in the United States, where he was born and raised.

For those readers not well-versed in the semi-literate warblings of teenage fucktards, the following translation is presented –

“What is up, fool? I have not talked to your gay face in a while. What have you been doing? What are you doing nowadays? Are you still wracked by anxiety over the quality of your rapping? Korea is gay. I hate Koreans. I want to come back (to the U.S.) more than anything else in the world. Frigging-A. Anyways, yes. Reply to me if only to chat. Your biggest fan. This is Jay the man. Peace.” Read the rest of this entry ?

The recent post on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen proved a trickier rant to shape and sculpt than expected. However, when hammering it out it suddenly occurred to me why, as a grown man, I’m still a fan of a toy franchise from my youth. I was into a lot of toys and characters when I was young but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a fan of He-Man anymore. I also stopped being a Star Wars fan after I saw The Phantom Menace and read an elucidating essay by J.G. Ballard that tore the first film (A New Hope) apart. Unlike quite a few geeks out there I do not collect action figures and have never purchased one as teenager/adult, although I admit to having once seen a figure of Kaneda from Akira on his futuristic motorcycle and being very tempted, because it was cool as fuck. It seems that the sole reason I still have an enthusiastic interest in Transformers is the first Transformers movie. I’m not talking about the Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg film from 2007; I mean the sublime, feature-length animated movie from 1986.

Transformers: The Movie was seared into my six-year-old imagination due to its unusually dark and violent tone. Well-known characters, the vast majority of them “good guys”, were properly killed onscreen, including the extremely popular Optimus Prime. For a child, this was akin to watching The Smurfs and seeing Gargamel finally snatching some of those little blue bastards up and biting their heads off like Goya’s Cronos devouring his children. It was heavy, challenging and ultimately thrilling stuff for a young boy. This seemingly subversive move was actually little more than a business driven ploy by Hasbro to wipe out their first toy line onscreen and clear the decks in order to introduce a whole new range of characters for the kids to buy. There was also an important loophole that could be exploited, the characters were robots and not human so their deaths could be graphically depicted in a cartoon without causing any problems with the rating. The creators of Transformers: The Movie therefore managed to deliver scenes like the Decepticons massacring the Autobots onboard a space shuttle, Megatron and Optimus Prime practically beating each other to death in a prolonged fight, robot characters screaming in agony as they are fed to robot sharks or dropped “alive” into vats of acid and an entire planet of men, women and children (who are nonetheless robots) being “eaten” and destroyed by another robot monster-planet. Read the rest of this entry ?